When students graduate from or leave a school, the removal of their accounts from your Google Apps domain should be managed to prevent the loss of student-owned content.

While accounts remain active, students can obtain their work by downloading copies or transferring content to a personal Google Apps account.

This article contains our recommendations that schools carry out before student accounts are suspended or deleted.

Unloading Student Accounts

Using an Organisational Unit

We recommend moving students that are leaving the school into their own organizational unit in your Google Apps domain. This will let you control which Google Apps and services are available to the students in this group, so you can remove student access to services such as Gmail while their accounts remain active.

Disabling Gmail

Gmail access can be turned off for this organizational unit to prevent students from sending and receiving emails with their school account, while still letting them access their work in other areas of Google Apps, such as Drive, Sites, and Blogger.

Students can extract their work

Student accounts can remain in this state for a number of months, during which students can extract their work by:

Downloading a copy of all Google content using the Google Takeout Service. This service lets users download their data from Google Services like Drive, Sites, Blogger, and Calendar.

Transferring data to a personal Google Account .

Because school domains do not let users transfer ownership beyond the school domain, students must make their copies using a personal account. To do this, students must first share their work with a personal account before logging in under this account and making their document copies. The personal account will own all copies made.

Student accounts are suspended

We recommend that student accounts are suspended for a number of months, to give students the opportunity to contact the school in the case of a misunderstanding or miscommunication. Student accounts can be reactivated within this period if needed, letting students access their content.

Student accounts are deleted from the domain

Following the above recommendations, student accounts can be deleted from the Google Apps domain. Once this occurs, everything owned by a student account in Google will be deleted automatically. After this point student accounts and deleted content cannot be recovered.